Speech error
Encyclopedia
Speech errors, commonly referred to as slips of the tongue (Latin: lapsus linguae), are conscious or unconscious deviations from the apparently intended form of an utterance. They can be subdivided into spontaneously and inadvertently produced speech
errors and intentionally produced word-plays or puns. Another distinction can be drawn between production and comprehension errors. Errors in speech production and perception are also called performance errors.
Speech errors are common among children, who have yet to refine their speech, and can frequently continue into adulthood. They sometimes lead to embarrassment and betrayal of the speaker's region
al or ethnic origins. However, it is also common for them to enter the popular culture
as a kind of linguistic "flavoring". Speech errors may be used intentionally for humorous effect, as with Spoonerism
s.
Within the field of psycholinguistics
, speech errors fall under the category of language
production. Types of speech errors include: exchange errors, perseveration, anticipation, shift, substitution, blends, additions, and deletions. The study of speech errors contributes to the establishment/refinement of models of speech production.
An outdated explanation for the occurrence of speech errors is the one of Sigmund Freud, who assumed that speech errors are the result of an intrapsychic conflict of concurrent intentions. “Virtually all speech errors [are] caused by the intrusion of repressed ideas from the unconscious into one’s conscious speech output”, Freud explained. This gave rise to the expression Freudian slip
. His theory was rejected because only a minority of speech errors was explainable by his theory.
Speech errors can affect different kinds of segments or linguistic units:
Performance errors may provide the linguist with empirical evidence for linguistic theories and serve to test hypotheses about language and speech production models. For that reason, the study of speech errors is significant for the construction of performance models and gives insight into language mechanisms.
Schachter et al. (1991) conducted an experiment to examine if the numbers of word choices affect pausing. They sat in on the lectures of 47 undergraduate professors from 10 different departments and calculated the number and times of filled pauses and unfilled pauses. They found significantly more pauses in the humanities departments as opposed to the natural sciences. These findings suggest that the greater the number of word choices, the more frequent are the pauses, and hence the pauses serve to allow us time to choose our words.
Slips of the tongue are another form of “errors” that can help us understand the process of speech production better. Slips can happen at many levels, at the syntactic level, at the phrasal level, at the lexical semantic level, at the morphological level and at the phonological level and they can take more than one form like: additions, substations, deletion, exchange, anticipation, perseveration, shifts, and haplologies M.F. Garrett, (1975). Slips are orderly because language production is orderly.
There are some biases shown through slips of the tongue. One kind is a lexical bias which shows that the slips people generate are more often actual words than random sound strings. Baars Motley and Mackay (1975) found that it was more common for people to turn two actual words to two other actual words than when they do not create real words. This suggests that lexems might overlap somewhat or be stored similarly.
A second kind is a semantic bias which shows a tendency for sound bias to create words that are semantically related to other words in the linguistic environment. Motley and Baars (1976) found that a word pair like “get one” will more likely slip to “wet gun” if the pair before it is “damp rifle”. These results suggest that we are sensitive to how things are laid out semantically.
Speech
Speech is the human faculty of speaking.It may also refer to:* Public speaking, the process of speaking to a group of people* Manner of articulation, how the body parts involved in making speech are manipulated...
errors and intentionally produced word-plays or puns. Another distinction can be drawn between production and comprehension errors. Errors in speech production and perception are also called performance errors.
Speech errors are common among children, who have yet to refine their speech, and can frequently continue into adulthood. They sometimes lead to embarrassment and betrayal of the speaker's region
Region
Region is most commonly found as a term used in terrestrial and astrophysics sciences also an area, notably among the different sub-disciplines of geography, studied by regional geographers. Regions consist of subregions that contain clusters of like areas that are distinctive by their uniformity...
al or ethnic origins. However, it is also common for them to enter the popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
as a kind of linguistic "flavoring". Speech errors may be used intentionally for humorous effect, as with Spoonerism
Spoonerism
A spoonerism is an error in speech or deliberate play on words in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched . It is named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner , Warden of New College, Oxford, who was notoriously prone to this tendency...
s.
Within the field of psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
, speech errors fall under the category of language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
production. Types of speech errors include: exchange errors, perseveration, anticipation, shift, substitution, blends, additions, and deletions. The study of speech errors contributes to the establishment/refinement of models of speech production.
Psycholinguistic explanations for the occurrence of speech errors
Speech errors are made on an occasional basis by all speakers. They occur more often when speakers are nervous, tired, anxious or intoxicated. During live broadcasts on TV or on the radio for example unprofessional speakers and even hosts often make speech errors because they are under stress. Some speakers seem to be more prone to speech errors than others. For example, there is a certain connection between stuttering and speech errors. Charles F. Hockett explains that “whenever a speaker feels some anxiety about possible lapse, he will be led to focus attention more than normally on what he has just said and on what he is just about to say. These are ideal breeding grounds for stuttering." Another example of a “chronic sufferer” is Reverend William Archibald Spooner, whose peculiar speech may be caused by a cerebral dysfunction, but there is much evidence that he invented his famous speech errors (spoonerisms).An outdated explanation for the occurrence of speech errors is the one of Sigmund Freud, who assumed that speech errors are the result of an intrapsychic conflict of concurrent intentions. “Virtually all speech errors [are] caused by the intrusion of repressed ideas from the unconscious into one’s conscious speech output”, Freud explained. This gave rise to the expression Freudian slip
Freudian slip
A Freudian slip, also called parapraxis, is an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is interpreted as occurring due to the interference of some unconscious , subdued, wish, conflict, or train of thought...
. His theory was rejected because only a minority of speech errors was explainable by his theory.
Psycholinguistic classification of speech errors
There are few speech errors that clearly fall into only one category. The majority of speech errors can be interpreted in different ways and thus fall into more than one category. For this reason, you are well advised to be skeptical about percentage figures for the different kinds of speech errors. Moreover, the study of speech errors gave rise to different terminologies and different ways of classifying speech errors. Here is a collection of the main types:| Type | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Addition | "Additions add linguistic material." | Target: We Error: We and I |
| Anticipation | "A later segment takes the place of an earlier segment." | Target: reading list Error: leading list |
| Blend Blend In linguistics, a blend is a word formed from parts of two or more other words. These parts are sometimes, but not always, morphemes.-Linguistics:... s |
Blends are a subcategory of lexical selection errors. More than one item is being considered during speech production. Consequently, the two intended items fuse together. | Target: person/people Error: perple |
| Deletion | Deletions or omissions leave some linguistic material out. | Target: unanimity of opinion Error: unamity of opinion |
| Exchange | Exchanges are double shifts. Two linguistic units change places. | Target: getting your nose remodeled Error: getting your model renosed |
| Lexical selection error | The speaker has "problems with selecting the correct word". | Target: tennis racquet Error: tennis bat |
| Malapropism Malapropism A malapropism is an act of misusing or the habitual misuse of similar sounding words, especially with humorous results. An example is Yogi Berra's statement: "Texas has a lot of electrical votes," rather than "electoral votes".-Etymology:... , classical |
The speaker has the wrong beliefs about the meaning of a word. Consequently, he produces the intended word, which is semantically inadequate. Therefore, this is rather a competence error than a performance error. Malapropisms are named after a character from Richard B. Sheridan’s eighteenth-century play “The Rivals”. | Target:The flood damage was so bad they had to evacuate the city. Error: The flood damage was so bad they had to evaporate the city. |
| Metathesis Metathesis (linguistics) Metathesis is the re-arranging of sounds or syllables in a word, or of words in a sentence. Most commonly it refers to the switching of two or more contiguous sounds, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:... |
"Switching of two sounds, each taking the place of the other." | Target: pus pocket Error: pos pucket |
| Morpheme-exchange error | Morphemes change places. | Target: He has already packed two trunks. Error: He has already packs two trunked. |
| Morpheme stranding | Morphemes remain in place but are attached to the wrong words. | Target: He has already packed two trunks. Error: He has already trunked two packs. |
| Omission | cf. deletions | Target: She can’t tell me. Error: She can tell me. |
| Perseveration | "An earlier segment replaces a later item." | Target: black boxes Error: black bloxes |
| Shift | "One speech segment disappears from its appropriate location and appears somewhere else." | Target: She decides to hit it. Error: She decide to hits it. |
| Sound-exchange error | Two sounds switch places. | Target: Night life [nait laif] Error: Knife light [naif lait] |
| Spoonerism Spoonerism A spoonerism is an error in speech or deliberate play on words in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched . It is named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner , Warden of New College, Oxford, who was notoriously prone to this tendency... |
A spoonerism is a kind of metathesis. Switching of initial sounds of two separate words. They are named after Reverend William Archibald Spooner, who probably invented most of his famous spoonerisms. | Target: I saw you light a fire. Error: I saw you fight a liar. |
| Substitution | One segment is replaced by an intruder.The source of the intrusion is not in the sentence. | Target: Where is my tennis racquet? Error: Where is my tennis bat? |
| Word-exchange error | A word-exchange error is a subcategory of lexical selection errors. Two words are switched. | Target: I must let the cat out of the house. Error: I must let the house out of the cat. |
Speech errors can affect different kinds of segments or linguistic units:
| Segment | Example |
|---|---|
| Distinctive or phonetic features | Target: clear blue sky Error: glear plue sky (voicing) |
| Phonemes or sounds | Target: ad hoc Error: odd hack |
| Sequences of sounds | Target:spoon feeding Error: foon speeding |
| Morphemes | Target: sure Error: unsure |
| Words | Target: I hereby deputize you. Error: I hereby jeopardize you. |
| Phrases | Target: The sun is shining./The sky is blue. Error: The sky is shining. |
Types of speech errors
- Grammatical - For example children take time to learn irregular verbIrregular verbIn contrast to regular verbs, irregular verbs are those verbs that fall outside the standard patterns of conjugation in the languages in which they occur. The idea of an irregular verb is important in second language acquisition, where the verb paradigms of a foreign language are learned...
s, so in EnglishEnglish languageEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
use the -edPast tenseThe past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future...
form incorrectly. See Words and RulesWords and RulesWords and Rules: The Ingredients of Language is a 1999 popular linguistics book by Steven Pinker on the subject of regular and irregular verbs...
. - MispronunciationMispronunciationMispronunciation is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "incorrect or inaccurate pronunciation". The matter of what is or is not mispronunciation is a contentious one, and indeed there is some disagreement about the extent to which the term is even meaningful...
- VocabularyVocabularyA person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...
Young childrenInfantA newborn or baby is the very young offspring of a human or other mammal. A newborn is an infant who is within hours, days, or up to a few weeks from birth. In medical contexts, newborn or neonate refers to an infant in the first 28 days after birth...
make categoryCategorizationCategorization is the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Categorization implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose. Ideally, a category illuminates a relationship between the subjects and objects of knowledge...
approximations, using carČarČar is a village in the municipality of Bujanovac, Serbia. According to the 2002 census, the town has a population of 296 people.-References:...
for lorryLorry-Transport:* Lorry or truck, a large motor vehicle* Lorry, or a Mine car in USA: an open gondola with a tipping trough* Lorry , a horse-drawn low-loading trolley-In fiction:...
for example. See hypernymHypernymIn linguistics, a hyponym is a word or phrase whose semantic field is included within that of another word, its hypernym . In simpler terms, a hyponym shares a type-of relationship with its hypernym...
.
Examples
- "Antartica" (Antarctica) <- elisionElisionElision is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker to pronounce...
- "particuly" (particularly) <- elisionElisionElision is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker to pronounce...
- "syntaxically" (syntactically) <- vocabularyVocabularyA person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...
Scientific relevance of speech errors
Speech production is a highly complex and extremely rapid process so that research into the involved mental mechanisms is very difficult. Investigating the audible output of the speech production system is a way to understand these mental mechanisms. According to Gary S. Dell “the inner workings of a highly complex system are often revealed by the way in which the system breaks down”. Therefore, speech errors are of an explanatory value with regard to the nature of language and language production.Performance errors may provide the linguist with empirical evidence for linguistic theories and serve to test hypotheses about language and speech production models. For that reason, the study of speech errors is significant for the construction of performance models and gives insight into language mechanisms.
Evidence and insights provided by speech errors
- Speech errors provide investigators with insights into the sequential order of language production processes.
- Speech errors clue investigators in on the interactivity of language production modules.
- The existence of lexical or phonemic exchange errors provides evidence that speakers typically engage in forward planning their utterances. It seems that before the speaker starts speaking the whole utterance is available.
- Anticipation
- Target: Take my bike.
- Error: Bake my bike.
- Anticipation
- Target: He pulled a tantrum.
- Error: He pulled a pantrum.
- Performance errors supply evidence for the psychological existence of discrete linguistic units.
- Speech errors involve substitutions, shifts, additions and deletions of segments. “In order to move a sound, the speaker must think of it as a separate unit.” Obviously, one cannot account for speech errors without speaking of these discrete segments. They constitute the planning units of language production. Among them are distinctive features, phonemes, morphemes, syllables, words and phrases. Victoria Fromkin points out that “many of the segments that change and move in speech errors are precisely those postulated by linguistic theories.” Consequently, speech errors give evidence that these units are psychologically real.
- One can infer from speech errors that speakers adhere to a set of linguistic rules.
- “There is a complex set of rules which the language user follows when making use of these units.” Among them are for example phonetic constraints, which prescribe the possible sequences of sounds. Moreover, the study of speech error confirmed the existence of rules that state how morphemes are to be pronounced or how they should be combined with other morphemes. The following examples show that speech errors also observe these rules:
-
- Target: He likes to have his team rested. [rest+id]
- Error: He likes to have his rest teamed. [ti:m+d]
-
- Target: Both kids are sick. [kid+z]
- Error: Both sicks are kids. [sik+s]
- Here the past tense morpheme resp. the plural morpheme is phonologically conditioned, although the lemmasLemma (psycholinguistics)In psycholinguistics, a lemma is an abstract conceptual form of a word that has been mentally selected for utterance in the early stages of speech production...
are exchanged. This proves that first the lemmas are inserted and then phonological conditioning takes place.
-
- Target: Don’t yell so loud! / Don’t shout so loud!
- Error: Don’t shell so loud!
- “Shout” and “yell” are both appropriate words in this context. Due to the pressure to continue speaking, the speaker has to make a quick decision which word should be selected. This pressure leads to the speaker’s attempt to utter the two words simultaneously, which resulted in the creation of a blend. According to Charles F. Hockett there are six possible blends of “shout” and “yell”. Why did the speaker choose “shell” and not one of the alternatives? The speaker obeyed unconscious linguistic rules because he selected the blend, which satisfied the linguistic demands of these rules the best. Illegal non-words are for example instantaneously rejected.
- In conclusion, the rules which tell language users how to produce speech must also be part of our mental organization of language.
- Substitution errors, for instance, reveal parts of the organization and structure of the mental lexicon.
-
- Target: My thesis is too long.
- Error: My thesis is too short.
- In case of substitution errors both segments mostly belong to the same category, which means for example that a noun is substituted for a noun. Lexical selection errors are based on semantic relations such as synonymy, antonymy or membership of the same lexical field. For this reason the mental lexicon is structured in terms of semantic relationships.
-
- Target: George’s wife
- Error: George’s life
-
- Target: fashion square
- Error: passion square
- Some substitution errors which are based on phonological similarities supply evidence that the mental lexicon is also organized in terms of sound.
- Errors in speech are non-random. Linguists can elicit from the speech error data how speech errors are produced and which linguistic rules they adhere to. As a result they are able to predict speech errors.
- Four generalizations about speech errors have been identified:
- Interacting elements tend to come from a similar linguistic environment, which means that initial, middle, final segments interact with one another.
- Elements that interact with one another tend to be phonetically or semantically similar to one another. This means that consonants exchange with consonants and vowels with vowels.
- Slips are consistent with the phonological rules of the language.
- There are consistent stress patterns in speech errors. Predominantly, both interacting segments receive major or minor stress.
Information obtained from performance additions
An example of the information that can be obtained is the use of "um" or "uh" in a conversation. These might be meaningful words that tell different things, one of which is to hold a place in the conversation so as not to be interrupted. There seems to be a hesitant stage and fluent stage that suggest speech has different levels of production. The pauses seem to occur between sentences, conjunctional points and before the first content word in a sentence. That suggests that a large part of speech production happens there.Schachter et al. (1991) conducted an experiment to examine if the numbers of word choices affect pausing. They sat in on the lectures of 47 undergraduate professors from 10 different departments and calculated the number and times of filled pauses and unfilled pauses. They found significantly more pauses in the humanities departments as opposed to the natural sciences. These findings suggest that the greater the number of word choices, the more frequent are the pauses, and hence the pauses serve to allow us time to choose our words.
Slips of the tongue are another form of “errors” that can help us understand the process of speech production better. Slips can happen at many levels, at the syntactic level, at the phrasal level, at the lexical semantic level, at the morphological level and at the phonological level and they can take more than one form like: additions, substations, deletion, exchange, anticipation, perseveration, shifts, and haplologies M.F. Garrett, (1975). Slips are orderly because language production is orderly.
There are some biases shown through slips of the tongue. One kind is a lexical bias which shows that the slips people generate are more often actual words than random sound strings. Baars Motley and Mackay (1975) found that it was more common for people to turn two actual words to two other actual words than when they do not create real words. This suggests that lexems might overlap somewhat or be stored similarly.
A second kind is a semantic bias which shows a tendency for sound bias to create words that are semantically related to other words in the linguistic environment. Motley and Baars (1976) found that a word pair like “get one” will more likely slip to “wet gun” if the pair before it is “damp rifle”. These results suggest that we are sensitive to how things are laid out semantically.
See also
- Folk etymology
- metathesisMetathesis (linguistics)Metathesis is the re-arranging of sounds or syllables in a word, or of words in a sentence. Most commonly it refers to the switching of two or more contiguous sounds, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:...
- epenthesisEpenthesisIn phonology, epenthesis is the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially to the interior of a word. Epenthesis may be divided into two types: excrescence, for the addition of a consonant, and anaptyxis for the addition of a vowel....
- List of portmanteaus
- Barbarism (grammar)Barbarism (grammar)Barbarism refers to a non-standard word, expression or pronunciation in a language, particularly one prescriptively regarded as an error in morphology, while a solecism is something prescriptively regarded as an error in syntax. The term is used mainly for the written language...
- malapropismMalapropismA malapropism is an act of misusing or the habitual misuse of similar sounding words, especially with humorous results. An example is Yogi Berra's statement: "Texas has a lot of electrical votes," rather than "electoral votes".-Etymology:...
- Signorelli parapraxisSignorelli parapraxisThe Signorelli parapraxis represents the first and best known example of a parapraxis and its analysis in Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The parapraxis centers on a word finding problem and the production of substitutes...